Field
The disclosed embodiments generally relate to techniques for sampling and analyzing telemetry data obtained from sensors in an enterprise computing system. More specifically, the disclosed embodiments relate to a sampling-densification technique that facilitates generating high-sampling-density signatures for telemetry data obtained from sensors in enterprise computing systems.
Related Art
Enterprise computing systems often monitor telemetry data obtained from internal physical sensors and software resources to diagnose operational issues that might arise and, if necessary, to issue warnings of impending problems. Unfortunately, commonly used threshold-based warnings and diagnostics are “reactive” in nature; by the time a threshold limit has been exceeded, the problem is already severely affecting system performance (or the system has crashed). Because of the business-critical nature of enterprise and cloud computing systems, this endemic limitation of threshold-based diagnostics has motivated the development of predictive analytic techniques to proactively alert system operators of incipient anomalies, hopefully with enough lead time so that problems can be avoided or proactively fixed.
However, the effectiveness of predictive-analytics techniques is highly dependent on the obtainable sampling rates for the monitored metrics. This is a problem because the maximum achievable telemetry sampling rates in enterprise computing systems are severely constrained by standards that have evolved over the past two decades and will be very difficult to change. In almost all cases, telemetry sampling rates are hard-coded into the low-level hardware registers and system firmware. In other cases, administrators are not allowed to increase these sampling rates because system-bus bandwidths and I/O bandwidths would become saturated if the sampling rates were increased.
Hence, what is needed is a method and an apparatus that facilitates extracting high-sampling-rate signatures for telemetry data without having to make hardware modifications to enterprise computing systems.